Thursday, July 26, 2012

9gag: Hey, let’s taunt McKinney with a blatantly-incorrect representation of
his sexuality and provoke him into writing a boring blog post about it on his
boring blog.

So here we are.

As the title of the post states, I am asexual. I experience no
desire to have sex with anyone, regardless of their appearance, gender,
personality, or philosophy. You’d think this would be an easy concept to grasp,
but you’d be wrong. I’ll be using this post to clear up a few common
misconceptions about asexuality, because I’m sure everyone will enjoy that.

And the rant: an asexual relationship is NOT the same thing
as being “friendzoned” The very concept of the friendzone is founded on
butthurt men and women on the internet not grasping that not everyone
everywhere who wants to be on friendly terms with them also wants to sleep with
them. Asexuality is not about love or an inability thereof. If someone is
asexual it can mean a variety of things but generally means they simply have no
desire to have sex.

The simplest way to explain it is in terms of a linear
scale: In a similar manner to the way Kinsey described the spectrum of human
sexuality (from purely heterosexual to purely homosexual) the scale can be
expanded into two dimensions to account for the spectrum of hypersexuality to
asexuality. This does not cover the entire breadth of what asexuality is to
different people, however. For some/most people (indeed, when one immerses
oneself in so-called “non-standard sexualities” as I have, it’s easy to forget
that I’m talking about a relatively small fraction of the population here.)
their desire to be romantically involved with their gender-of-choice is
intimately tied to their desire for sexual intercourse with them. For many
(though by no means all) asexuals, this tie is still present, so a lack of
sexual drive results in a lack of romantic drive. For others, this tie is
negligible if even present at all, which leads to a more active romantic life.
And there are certainly some who don’t even think about dating in those
mechanistic terms! Thus, our newly-2D Kinsey scale (Kinsey Scatter Plot?) must
necessarily be expanded to include a 3rd axis: romanticism.

Moreover:

Sex is NOT the universal end-goal for relationships. One can
have a wonderful, fulfilling relationship with another person without ever
being physically intimate with them in any way. Love is an emotion; what people
do in their romantic unions is as unique to them as the couple itself. I’d
certainly like to think that if I can maintain a relationship for over a year,
then my non-sexual relationship is a bit more emotionally-founded than Joe
Blow’s one-night-stand. Dating is like a huge, many-layered cake; some people
like the top layer, others like the bottom (Insert dom/sub joke here) and
others like different layers in between. Making the assumption our unfortunate
example has (that if a guy likes a girl and isn’t boning her six ways to Sunday)
belies a sad lack of emotional depth. They assume that the dating cake only has
one layer. And a one-layer cake is still going to be delicious, but it’d be
remiss of me not to at least understand what the other layers have going on.

I guess the most important thing one should take from this
is: love who you want to love, in the way and circumstances you want to love
them. Just don’t trash talk other people’s relationship paradigms without
learning anything about them. You know who else does stuff like that?
Homophobes. And homophobia is not welcome here. And another thing, asexual
relationships are not the same thing as friendzoning, and the friendzone isn’t
even a thing, and- *is shot*

Well I guess the friendzone rant will have to wait for
another night. I hope that this is at least slightly coherent, dear reader.
Until next time!

Thursday, July 12, 2012

A lot of literature has been produced on why my generation
is so spoiled. Some blame so-called helicopter parents, hovering over their
children, obliterating anything that could challenge or hurt them. Others blame
media schilling the message of specialism, or snowflake syndrome. I blame
music. Specifically, mp3 players. It’s hard not to feel like you’re going
someplace important when you’re listening to this while walking there:

On the flip side, few things can exacerbate a
feeling of isolation like listening to a playlist full of this for hours on
endless repeat:

And with an mp3 player, you can listen to that as much as
you want, whenever. You’re in control of the music and no one can make you
change it, as long as you’ve got some headphones. Your will is all that
matters. The preceding generations had to wait for songs they liked to play on the radio, find a way to record them, or buy their cassette tapes. (and on long car rides it was all down to what the people in the front seat of the car wanted to listen to) The generations that came before THEM had to hope they had friends who could play music or hope for the money to buy a phonograph and records. We are the first generation to grow up with the power to choose the soundtrack of our lives for ourselves. More to the point, we are the first generation that -for good or ill- has the opportunity to truly lose itself (and thereby its perspective of the rest of the world) in its music.